Students are becoming disenchanted with college
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
The college diploma is getting a hard reappraisal.
Why it matters: Students today are taking a tougher look at the college tradeoff: burdensome debt and no guarantee of a dream career — or employment at all, as AI threatens the jobs the degrees were meant to unlock.
The big picture: Confidence in higher education slipped among both parties and all levels of educational attainment this year, according to June Gallup polling.
- Job market fears are also surging: Gallup found just 19% of those with a college degree or more said it was a good time to find a quality job at the end of 2025, compared to 35% of those without one.
Yes, but: There's a college confidence paradox: Even as Americans sour on higher education, they keep sending their kids to campus.
- "There is still massive pressure on them from their high schools, the educators at their schools, their parents, their peers, and just the broader culture to still go to college," says The Up & Up founder and Gen Z researcher Rachel Janfaza.
The anxiety isn't new — but the reality is. Today's concerns fall into three big buckets:
- 💵 Affordability: "I didn't want to take out loans, and I didn't want to put my family through that stress of trying to fund it," says Gabriel Sheahan, a 24-year-old studying welding and fabrication at Lincoln Technical Institute, a trade school in New Jersey.
- 🏛️ Getting your money's worth: "How does it make sense that you're giving me this deadline to have my degree finished, and I can't even get the classes that I want? I'm in so much competition with all these people. It feels ... like a rat race," Rachel Sukkar, a 19-year-old philosophy major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says.
- 🎓 Outcomes: "There's just so much volatility, and you can't guarantee the same amount of success that you could 20 years ago with a college degree now," says Moksha Agrawal, a 17-year-old incoming high school senior.
State of play: Vocational and trade programs provide an alternative route.
- About half of KC's workforce is skilled through alternative routes, and more local employers are shifting to skills-based hiring.
- Prep KC and Real World Learning are placing high school graduates on alternative job paths.
The bottom line: High schools and colleges need to adapt to the changing job market, Janfaza says, giving more weight to extracurriculars and soft skills.